Friday, December 26, 2014

Transparency In The Hall: An Appreciation Of Repoz's Gizmo

It is probably not too strong to suggest that Darren Viola's Hall of Fame Ballot Collecting Gizmo — an annualevent for a number of years now — has sparked a dialogue about transparency in BBWAA voting that is vastly overdue. That it must be crowdsourced is understandable (at least for a while), as is the humble and necessarily incomplete means by which it operates. I came across a piece today from one Steve Buckley in the Boston Herald which neatly encapsulated many of the problems I have with the process, while somehow managing never to mention the Gizmo (emboldening mine, as always):

Look, I get it: Nobody gets 100 percent of the votes. It’s
supposed to have something to do with “tradition,” and something to do
with the inconvenient truth that the original Hall of Fame class of 1936
— Ty Cobb! Honus Wagner! Babe Ruth! Christy Mathewson! Walter Johnson! —
had no unanimous selections.

But it’s wrong, and it needs to
stop. And so for housekeeping purposes, I’ll repeat what I wrote in
December of 2012: “Fans should know our selections.” And I’ll also
repeat what I wrote in January of 2008: “. . . this absolutely should
not be limited to active members of the BBWAA. Retired writers should
also be asked to name the names on their ballots.”

...

And if there’s a retired baseball writer out there whose best case for not voting for Martinez is: “I never saw him pitch,” then said baseball writer shouldn’t be voting. Fair, right?

There's a bunch more there, including why we need to shame the anti-steroids voters, and especially the "they all did it" tar-and-featherers. It's one reason why I'm especially pleased to see Buster Olney's surprisingly principled protest empty ballot, even if I think the act is misguided in some wise. There's just no excuse for keeping Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens out of the Hall, and something needs to be done about it, sooner rather than later. Thank you, Darren, for helping to get this out in the open.